{"id":5192,"date":"2011-10-13T22:39:29","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T03:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=5192"},"modified":"2011-10-18T21:04:57","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T02:04:57","slug":"myths-of-origin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/5192","title":{"rendered":"Myths Of Origin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why am I here? \u00a0 What is my destiny?<\/p>\n

We ask these questions naturally. \u00a0 And as we grow up we are given answers. \u00a0 We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now. \u00a0 How it was mom and dad met. \u00a0 How it was we ourselves came to be. \u00a0 And when we are young, we do not question them. \u00a0 They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.<\/p>\n

And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.<\/p>\n

I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life. \u00a0 Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania. \u00a0 But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here. \u00a0 And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered. \u00a0 She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody. \u00a0 And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again. \u00a0 And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.<\/p>\n

Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that. \u00a0 And always when I asked, I got the same story.<\/p>\n

Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims. \u00a0 The event had disturbed her deeply. \u00a0 She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.<\/p>\n

Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough. \u00a0 Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war. \u00a0 It was world war II. \u00a0 He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews. \u00a0 But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him. \u00a0 He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.<\/p>\n

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Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed. \u00a0 Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended. \u00a0 His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb. \u00a0 She said the sight of it had driven him mad.<\/p>\n

So her relationship with her sailor came undone. \u00a0 Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital. \u00a0 She never saw him again. \u00a0 And then her father had his stroke. \u00a0 He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself. \u00a0 After six months of it he had another stroke and died.<\/p>\n

Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her. \u00a0 In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house. \u00a0 Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house. \u00a0 That was common in those days. \u00a0 Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.<\/p>\n

After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania. \u00a0 That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg. \u00a0 Sweet childhood memories. \u00a0 She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there. \u00a0 She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold. \u00a0 The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.<\/p>\n

But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in. \u00a0 During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him. \u00a0 Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin. \u00a0 They moved close to where her brother lived. \u00a0 And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad. \u00a0 They married, and soon they had a son. \u00a0 Me.<\/p>\n

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That is the story I was always told. \u00a0 It is the story of how I came to be. \u00a0 And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.<\/p>\n

My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business. \u00a0 And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife. \u00a0 Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.<\/p>\n

Really?<\/p>\n

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense. \u00a0 Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing. \u00a0 Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.<\/p>\n

I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains. \u00a0 When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people. \u00a0 \u00a0 And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich. \u00a0 Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast. \u00a0 Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train. \u00a0 Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it. \u00a0 It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast. \u00a0 So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then. \u00a0 If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned. \u00a0 You might send a postcard or two back home… \u00a0 Having a wonderful time, wish you were here…<\/em> You sure wouldn’t phone home. \u00a0 Way too expensive. \u00a0 Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury. \u00a0 Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail. \u00a0 You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days. \u00a0 Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country. \u00a0 The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.<\/p>\n

So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home. \u00a0 And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to. \u00a0 To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas. \u00a0 It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then. \u00a0 When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state. \u00a0 They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.<\/p>\n

Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there? \u00a0 I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines. \u00a0 And…she had friends there. \u00a0 I know because he spoke of them, but not often. \u00a0 There were a few she kept in correspondence with. \u00a0 They were friends she never saw again. \u00a0 After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.<\/p>\n

And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family. \u00a0 It was just part of the background noise. \u00a0 But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl. \u00a0 That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family. \u00a0 I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur \u00a0 photographer. \u00a0 The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.<\/p>\n

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He loved her very much. \u00a0 And she loved him very much. \u00a0 If there is anything I am certain of it is this. \u00a0 But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin. \u00a0 It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised. \u00a0 But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that. \u00a0 Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in. \u00a0 Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.<\/p>\n

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up. \u00a0 She had a life in Greensburg. \u00a0 She had friends, family, community. \u00a0 And so did her mother. \u00a0 Greensburg was their home. \u00a0 They were both born and raised there. \u00a0 It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was. \u00a0 And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California. \u00a0 Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.<\/p>\n

It makes no sense. \u00a0 They could have bought another house. \u00a0 Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends. \u00a0 Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband. \u00a0 In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet. \u00a0 They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California. \u00a0 Because granddad died of a stroke?<\/p>\n

No. \u00a0 Just…no. \u00a0 It makes no sense.<\/p>\n

I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was. \u00a0 Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me. \u00a0 I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated. \u00a0 I had his face. \u00a0 At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too. \u00a0 Did I talk too much? \u00a0 Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he. \u00a0 Did I forget to do my homework? \u00a0 That’s his dad in him. \u00a0 Was I too proud of something I had accomplished? \u00a0 A piece of artwork? \u00a0 A good grade in school? \u00a0 His dad was vain like that. \u00a0 Did I a get a bad mark in class? \u00a0 His dad was shiftless like that. \u00a0 Stubborn? \u00a0 His father’s blood obviously. \u00a0 Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son. \u00a0 I got used to it. \u00a0 By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.<\/p>\n

The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean. \u00a0 Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others. \u00a0 Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it. \u00a0 Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family. \u00a0 She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery. \u00a0 I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious. \u00a0 It still makes me furious to think about it. \u00a0 So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.<\/p>\n

Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person. \u00a0 She set a good example for her son. \u00a0 After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went. \u00a0 That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her. \u00a0 It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to. \u00a0 He cousin also loved her very much. \u00a0 Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much. \u00a0 And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated. \u00a0 So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.<\/p>\n

I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad. \u00a0 But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation. \u00a0 Was that really all of it? \u00a0 I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense. \u00a0 You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness. \u00a0 Something happened.<\/p>\n

Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own. \u00a0 The marriage didn’t last. \u00a0 Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work. \u00a0 Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg. \u00a0 They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time. \u00a0 She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages. \u00a0 We lived in a series of small apartments. \u00a0 Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone. \u00a0 I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made. \u00a0 Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out. \u00a0 It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out. \u00a0 I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad. \u00a0 They basically shut her out.<\/p>\n

But not grandma. \u00a0 Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house. \u00a0 Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it. \u00a0 She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s\/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes. \u00a0 I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others. \u00a0 When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow. \u00a0 And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated. \u00a0 Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap<\/em> was her favorite name for me.<\/p>\n

And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older. \u00a0 I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry. \u00a0 I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes. \u00a0 I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face. \u00a0 I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette. \u00a0 When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that. \u00a0 Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses. \u00a0 We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on: \u00a0 I never doubted mom’s love. \u00a0 Never. \u00a0 Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise. \u00a0 The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.<\/p>\n

How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me. \u00a0 She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother. \u00a0 Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents. \u00a0 Everyone told me how nice mine was. \u00a0 Everyone. \u00a0 It wasn’t an act. \u00a0 Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably. \u00a0 I never once heard her complain. \u00a0 At least, not when I was there to hear it. \u00a0 Mostly the family tension was just there in the background. \u00a0 Always there. \u00a0 Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it. \u00a0 Mom loved me, that was all that mattered. \u00a0 The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again. \u00a0 It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast. \u00a0 \u00a0 But that incident centered on dad. \u00a0 That they hated him does not really explain it all.<\/p>\n

Something happened. \u00a0 Something more then just her marrying dad. \u00a0 Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning. \u00a0 Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for. \u00a0 Probably I’ll never know what it was. \u00a0 Mom never strayed from the story. \u00a0 Nobody else did either.<\/p>\n

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[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]<\/em><\/p>\n

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Why am I here? \u00a0 What is my destiny? We ask these questions naturally. \u00a0 And as we grow up we are given answers. \u00a0 We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now. \u00a0 How it was mom and dad met. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[95,103,99,55],"class_list":["post-5192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-schrodingers-bag-o-laughs","tag-the-human-heart","tag-the-human-status","tag-this-and-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}